1. Field
The present embodiments relate to an apparatus, system, and method of inspecting an image formed by an image forming apparatus, and a recording medium storing an image inspection control program.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, inspection of printed matter is performed by human operators. In recent years, an inspection apparatus that automatically inspects printed matter is widely used, mainly in the field of offset printing. For example, a master image is generated by reading specific printed matter that is selected based on the image quality, as a reference image. The corresponding portions of the master image and a read image of printed matter are compared to determine, by the degree of difference therebetween, whether there is a defect in the printed matter.
A printing apparatus, such as an electrophotographic apparatus, is widely used to print a small number of pages. For example, a printing apparatus may perform variable printing in which the contents to be printed differ in each page. In this case, comparing the printed matter, with the master image generated from the printed matter is inefficient. In view of this, the master image may be generated based on print data to be output as a printed image of printed matter, and compared with the printed image subjected for inspection.
In such printout defect detection technologies, for example, the data of the page in which the defect is detected may be transmitted to another information processing apparatus via a network. Third parties may inspect the data of the page in which the defect was detected. For example, for the identification of the defect reason, a device maker may inspect the page. In this situation, personal information included in the inspection target image should be encrypted.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-531015 proposes a method of encrypting the image information for every encoding unit of encoding the image information as a method of encrypting a part of the image information.
The technology disclosed by Japanese Application No. 2002-531015 is encrypting by making the encoding unit at the time of encoding image information into a unit. Therefore, the part that should not be disclosed on a displayed image cannot selectively be encrypted. In the above-mentioned image inspection, since it is necessary to disclose especially the part that has the defect, without encrypting, one needs to selectively encrypt only the part containing the personal information.
On the other hand, when a defect is detected in a portion that should be encrypted, that portion should be encrypted to protect information, but on the other hand, it is necessary to disclose the defect to a third party without encryption to determine the cause of the defect.